With the advents of the printing press, typeset, typewriting machines, and computer-implemented word processing and storage, the amount of information generated by mankind has risen dramatically and with an ever quickening pace. As a result there is a continuing and growing need to collect and store, identify, track, classify and catalogue for retrieval and distribution this growing sea of information, which has spawned an interdisciplinary science called “information science.” Information Science is a broad area with a wide-range of participants and is associated with computer science and information management. It is concerned with the structure, representation, management, storage, retrieval and transfer of information and with the human experience in relating with such pursuits. There is a recognized relationship between the science and technology of Information Science (“IS”) that covers technical issues such as information/data flow, database systems and data security, user interfaces, information quality and assurance, network reliability and network security, computer systems and computer system administration. Organizations, such as American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), serve to promote the field of IS including through standardization. Up to this point the efforts have been directed primarily to ways to better collect, process, track, classify, cluster and distribute information and documents—in essence, the efforts have been focused on the documents and organizing the documents and content.
In today's business environment, information is of critical importance. But all information is not created equal and certain types of information are more important and more valuable than other types of information. Moreover, circumstances and purpose may determine when certain types of information and documents are “more or less” important than other types of information. One type of information which is highly valuable and highly prized is relationship information. A relationship is a piece of information that indicates an association or link (e.g., business, professional, social, familial, or personal relationship or related connection) between an individual or entity and another individual or entity. In the business environment, the most valuable type of relationship is a relationship that facilitates or supports the initiation, forward progress, or successful conclusion of a business dealing. Given that a transaction between two parties cannot begin until the parties are somehow brought together, relationships are vital pieces of information which can catalyze a business deal between two or more entities. For this reason, the relationship information held by an individual, an enterprise or a community is highly valuable.
The information about a particular individual or entity is contact information. The links between contacts may be defined or represented as relationships. Commercial software providers have developed a number of different software tools that allow individuals and entities to manage their contacts, store their contacts, and share their contacts. Examples of such tools include InterAction, Outlook, and ACT. Some of these tools also have simple functionality to represent rudimentary relationship information, although they are typically time consuming to administer, difficult to set up and laborious to employ. Each typically requires that a new database be developed, maintained and serviced. For example, in Outlook relationships can be represented by notes in the body of contact cards stored in a public folder. Only then is the system available for users to search through to find relationships of interest.
Moreover, these systems fail to distinguish between a valuable relationship and a less valuable contact, unless a user has manually entered a suitable note to that effect. In other words, each relationship is treated the same, with no measure of relative strength. Consequently, when a user employs these tools it is difficult for the user to distinguish between relationships that are likely to be helpful, and relationships that are unlikely to be helpful. Additionally, even if a user enters information about the value or relative strength or importance of a relationship, there is no reliable way to distinguish or measure the strength of a relationship to the same person or entity entered by two different users. There is no basis or system for ensuring an objective method of how different users subjectively perceive or measure relationship strength.
An additional drawback with these existing systems is that they fail to provide desirable privacy protection for all participants in the system. Both the privacy provided and the flexibility in choosing privacy levels are inadequate. Even systems that do allow for some degree of flexibility in choosing privacy levels are too difficult and complex and impractical in practice. Current systems with complex privacy controls are underutilized. For example, the existing systems may sweep through the electronic address books of different individuals in an enterprise and take the collected information to form a database that is completely open: once the information is stored in the database any user can come and search that database to find a contact of interest and see the detailed contact information without informing the original ‘owner’ of that contact. As such, individuals are hesitant to put information into an electronic address book or other system that can get swept into a publicly available or enterprise wide contact system that will allow anyone to directly contact people they have personal relationships with. As individuals then use their electronic address book systems only for a portion of their contacts, the collected relationship information is incomplete. What is needed is a system that can share information and provide appropriate level of security and privacy without requiring a user to actively manipulate and/or set up the system.
Existing contact systems fail to meet the need of organizations to better leverage relationships existing within its community. Contact management systems do not adequately capture and rank relationships, they require manual entry and updating, and they do not provide adequate privacy protection for all participants. Current contact management systems require substantial manual intervention, do not readily provide meaningful results, are difficult to search in a meaningful way and produce a subjective result. Using current technology, it is difficult to determine which contacts are identified with which entities, and which relationships are both valid and meaningful. These drawbacks, and others, make them poor tools for discovering contacts and relationships of participants in the network system.
Additional drawbacks in existing networking products (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter) are opt-in, user-directed creation and maintenance of relationships. What is lacking is a centralized function that provides and maintains a central or “master” user profile to facilitate efficient delivery of meaningful and timely information to assist individual users, as well as their employers, in their various professional and personal pursuits.